Summary of the Book

This book has argued that patterns of ethnic violence in India stem from legacies of colonial rule that were reinforced over time through institutions. India is well known as having been the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire; less well known is that the British never controlled the entire country. Most of the areas that were already British colonies prior to the conquest of India had been brought under direct rule, but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the subcontinent from being entirely annexed. Afterward, roughly one-fourth of the Indian population lived in princely states ruled by largely autonomous native kings. This key historical divide forms the colonial origins of ethnic violence in contemporary India. Both the British administrators and the princely rulers governed heterogeneous populations, but they had very different conceptions of how to manage this ethnic diversity. In the provinces, British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste. Colonial officials chose this particular identity after the Rebellion of 1857, which they perceived as a religious(primarily Islamic) uprising, because they were intent on de-emphasizing religion. Caste (along with tribal identities) was promoted as the central organizing principle for a new, modern society. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the caste system was divorced from its Hindu origins and became largely a system of social categories. It was subsequently viewed as scientific in character, bearing resemblance (depending on the administrator) either to race or to the class structure of Victorian England.

Beginning with this assumption, British administrators then stratified ethnic groups by enforcing policies that benefited high castes but discriminated against low castes and tribals. High castes such as the jenmis in Malabar, for example, gained a new proprietary right over the land, while low castes and adivasis in the region suddenly became tenants-at-will. At the same time, in the interests of promoting secularism, the British embraced a policy of religious neutrality, or what Peter Hardy (1972) has called “balance and rule.” In effect, this policy meant that groups such as Muslims, a small minority in the country, were protected under colonialism. In provinces such as Ajmer, Muslims came to form almost half of the local administration, and a culture of religious cooperation between Hindus and Muslims was gradually fostered. The outcome of these policies in the provinces was intense caste and tribal violence, but over the long term, communal conflict was minimized.

In the princely states, ethnic politics was organized altogether differently. Native kings had always derived their legitimacy from religion—even in the precolonial period—and they had constructed theocratic states. Many territories were explicitly religious kingdoms; for example, Travancore, in the south, was officially dedicated to the Hindu god Padmanabha. In these areas, politics was organized around the centrality of religious legitimation, laws, shrines, customs, and rituals. Religion was inherently central to the princely states, but the British also reinforced this ethnic category: they believed that religious rule had been native to India, and some administrators relished the opportunity to highlight a divide between modern provinces and “backwards” princely states.

In their territories, native kings constructed policies of ethnic stratification that were the mirror image of British India; these policies benefited dominant religious groups but discriminated against minority religious groups. Even in states such as Kashmir, where most of the population was Muslim, the Hindu rulers of the kingdom brutally repressed them and enabled Hindus to dominate local politics. At the same time, many princes protected the lower castes and Adivasis. This was because, respectively, cultivators had a hereditary right to the land in many princely kingdoms, and certain tribes—like the Bhils in Rajasthan—were viewed as the earliest inhabitants of these states. These policies of ethnic stratification, in turn, created a pattern of intense religious violence, but minimal violence among castes and tribes. Thus, across India’s provinces and princely states, different conceptions of ethnicity led to different political cultures, then different policies of ethnic stratification led to different fault lines of ethnic violence.

This central theory—a new interpretation of British Indian history—is supported by extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence. The qualitative component is derived from fifteen months of fieldwork in India, in which primary source research was conducted in six archives and dozens of elites were interviewed in five carefully chosen case studies. The first two pairs of cases were controlled historical comparisons of two neighboring areas that were similar in most regards except that one was a British province and the other was a native state. Chapter 2 detailed a comparison of the districts of Jaipur and Ajmer in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Jaipur was a Hindu kingdom, and Ajmer was selected by colonial officials to be their lone outpost in the area then known as Rajputana. Chapter 3 then detailed a state-level comparison between the northern portion of Kerala, known as Malabar, and the southern region of the state, known as Travancore. These two cases constitute a “historical accident,” because the British wanted to bring all of Kerala under their control, but a variety of contingent factors enabled them to conquer only the north. The South consequently remained under the control of a powerful Hindu dynasty.

In both Ajmer and Malabar, extensive primary source evidence showed that the British emphasized the centrality of caste and tribal identities. Colonial officials who descended on Ajmer in the early nineteenth century were among the first administrators to codify the designation“untouchable,” and the effect of census operations in the area was the heightened salience of caste identities. New landholding and forest policiesinstituted in both provinces enhanced the power of zamindars butdispossessed low-caste agriculturalists and tribal groups. For example, in pre-British Malabar, there was most likely no system of private property, but British administrators misinterpreted the existing agricultural system and granted proprietary rights to jenmis. This new policy resulted in skyrocketing eviction rates and, subsequently, the earliest political mobilization of low castes and adivasis in the region.

Colonial administrators in Ajmer and Malabar also sought to minimize the salience of religion, and minority Muslim communities were protected by the British policy of religious neutrality. In Ajmer, Muslims constituted a large share of the government administration, and equality between Hindus and Muslims led to the religious divide slowly receding over time. In Malabar, although Muslims were responsible for a series of uprisings against the government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the vast majority of rebels were actually recent low-caste converts, and the history of this region since the advent of colonialism included repeated episodes of intercaste tension and violence. By the end of the British period, however, Malabar, like Ajmer, experienced almost no communal conflict. The colonial histories of Jaipur and Travancore, by contrast, were quite different. Hindu rajas ruled these theocratic states, and they emphasized the centrality of religion. The rulers of Travancore governed a state that, unlike most areas of northern India, had never come under the control of Muslim armies; these rajas were therefore particularly staunch defenders of Hinduism. The leaders of both areas heavily favored the Hindu majority while restricting the rights of Muslims and, in Travancore, Christians. In Jaipur, for instance, newspapers from the early twentieth century described the kingdom as one of the worst areas for communal violence in the entire country.

In both Jaipur and Travancore, however, the same rajas instituted a number of protective policies toward low castes and adivasis, which in turn prevented the growth of caste and tribal violence in these areas. The rulers of Jaipur acknowledged, for instance, that the Meena tribe ruled most of the state in the medieval period and therefore guaranteed them a ceremonial position in the kingdom and a certain allotment of government jobs. Similarly, land policies toward Adivasis in Travancore were among the most progressive in India. The rajas of Travancore also pushed for low-caste uplift aggressively after the mid-nineteenth century, opening the doors of Hindu temples to untouchables before any other region in India.

Across these four cases, the patterns of history are clear: British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste and enforced policies that stratified ethnic groups along these lines, but they simultaneously protected religious minorities. In these areas, caste and tribal identities became hegemonic, and violence centered on these identities; the religious divide, however, receded over time. Princely rulers, for their part, emphasized the centrality of religion and enforced religious policies of ethnic stratification, but they protected the lower castes and adivasis. Religious violence increased, but caste and tribal violence were minimized. These four cases drawn from such different geographical regions of India—regions with sharply contrasting cultural and historical attributes—highlight that bifurcated colonial rule created clear fault lines of ethnic conflict.

Many aspects of the argument presented in this book challenge traditional historical work on the colonial era in India. For example, the dominant view on religious violence in colonial India can be summed up as “princes good, British bad.” The controlled comparisons in Rajasthan and Keralademonstrate the opposite. Similarly, the area that experiences the most immense tribal conflict in contemporary India is not a former British province but a former princely state. To consider some of the limitations of the theory presented in this book, Chapter 4 examined the theory’s key deviant case, focusing on Bastar, a small, remote former princely state that is the single deadliest battleground for Naxalite conflict in modern India. An analysis of this kingdom has shown that tribal revolt began in Bastar in the mid-nineteenth century precisely because of creeping British influence in the state. Bastar was unique among Indian princely kingdoms in terms of the sheer amount of British interference in its administration: for almost half a century, it was ruled directly by colonial officials. Therefore, Bastar is the exception that proves the rule: where the British were in power, tribal rebellion soon followed.

Disparate sets of ethnic policies across provinces and princely areas created very different patterns of ethnic violence in India. In the post-independence period, these patterns have not dissipated. Dozens of elite interviews spanning Rajasthan, Kerala, and Chhattisgarh were conducted to study the modern period. Respondents drawn from district- and state-level government departments, NGOs, ethnic organizations, political parties, police administrations, newspapers, and universities all showcased that patterns of ethnic violence have not changed in postcolonial India. In Ajmer and Malabar, respondents detailed that conflict still revolves around caste and tribal identities. In Jaipur and Travancore, however, respondents highlighted the central role of religion in fomenting political violence. For example, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, mentioned at the beginning of this book, there were riots in both Jaipur and Travancore—but no corresponding riots occurred in neighboring Ajmer or Malabar. Patterns of violence established during the colonial period persisted into postcolonial India for two overarching reasons. First, they became embedded in both formal and informal institutions. Political parties in
Jaipur and Travancore, for instance, did not create new ethnic cleavage structures; instead, they built on the religious divide inherited from princely rule. Likewise, the Communist Party that has been so central to Malabar’s politics emphasized caste (then class) because of a long history of low-caste agitation in the region. Institutions as informal as the collective memories of different ethnic groups continued to structure ethnic conflict in one form or another. Patterns of violence became self-reinforcing; every riot hardened ethnic divides, built histories of animosity, and kept communities apart. Even major events did not alter these conflict patterns. For example, the partition caused much of the Muslim population in Ajmer to leave for Pakistan, but many of Jaipur’s Muslims also left. Partition affected both districts in similar ways, but in post-independence India, Jaipur continues to experience much more communal violence than Ajmer.

Second, the new postcolonial governments failed to implement the effective reforms of the past. For example, at the dawn of independence, agricultural reforms in Ajmer and Bastar began from a weakened position due to the power of British-backed zamindars, and new policies largely failed to improve the lives of landless, low-caste, and tribal laborers. One of the few exceptions was the state of Kerala, where the communists in Malabar used low-caste mobilization to come to power, implement a number of impressive reforms, and decrease the amount of ethnic violence in the state compared to most other regions.

Evidence from the case studies showcases a clear pattern of ethnic violence across contemporary India, but even five in-depth cases can potentially provide a misleading portrait of the entire country. Chapter 5, therefore, provided statistical evidence from almost six hundred Indian districts that similar ethnic conflict patterns exist across the country, even when controlling for a variety of alternative explanations such as poverty, geography, and levels of social development. British rule correlates strongly with contemporary caste and tribal violence, but negatively with religious conflict. The British experience in India after 1857 deeply influenced colonial administrators in London. They began to extol the virtues of what becameknown as the “Indian model” of colonialism. Colonial officials realized that combining direct and indirect rule was less expensive, less intrusive, and less likely to produce violent backlashes among native populations than outright direct rule. As the British Empire continued to expand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indian model was exported (in one form or another) to a number of new colonies across Africa and Asia. Chapter 6 provided an overview of ethnic politics and conflict in three such colonies: Burma, Malaya, and Nigeria. In all of these states, the British ruled certain areas directly but left other regions to be controlled by kings, sultans, or emirs.

In the directly ruled parts of these colonies, the British tended to implement a policy of de-emphasizing religion, no doubt drawing on the Indian experience. In Burma, for instance, the Buddhist monarchy was dismantled, and in Nigeria, the religious divide in Yorubaland was replaced by a concerted effort to make ancestral city membership salient. In some indirectly ruled areas, however, native rulers—often with the encouragement of British officials—continued to emphasize religion. The sultans of Malaya, for instance, became the defenders of Islam in their states. Bifurcated rule in these colonies created different fault lines of ethnic conflict. Even in the contemporary states of Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nigeria, there appear to be patterns of ethnic violence that descend from the British period. In northern Nigeria, religious violence has been a major problem, but not in Yorubaland. Racial tensions plague directly ruled Malaysia, but religious identification is still much stronger where the sultans once reigned. Chapter 6 provides evidence of the analytical power of drawing on the Indian model for insights into explaining contemporary ethnic violence in states around the Indian Ocean.

The arguments presented in this book contribute to several current debates within social science research. This project has aimed to advance work on the causes of ethnic violence in contemporary India, on the determinants of ethnic salience, and on the broader impact of colonialism on ethnic conflict. It is worth revisiting these three literatures to consider how the Indian case may provide answers to several of these important puzzles.

Ethnic Violence in Contemporary India.

An impressive body of literature within political science has examined the causes of ethnic conflict in India, specifically the recent and widespread occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots. Three central books (Brass 1997, 2003; Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004) emphasize several similar factors, including the rise of Hindu nationalist groups such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the incentive for political elites to promote violence in the run-up to elections. These books not only have vastly expanded our understanding of ethnic conflict in India, but also have done much to popularize Indian politics to a broader audience across the social sciences. However, two critical factors are missing across these works: a consideration of the deeper historical causes of contemporary violence, and a focus on forms of ethnic conflict other than communalism. Existing scholarship on Hindu-Muslim riots has focused on proximate causes, highlighting relatively recent factors such as the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1980s. Variables such as these are no doubt important, but this book focuses instead on the underlying causes of violence. A major problem with research on Hindu-Muslim riots is the fact that extensive religious violence occurred throughout Indian history, dating as far back as the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, one of the earliest Islamic empires in South Asia. Therefore, a deeper explanation is needed to understand the root causes of modern violence. By looking at the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, this book offers a more historically grounded theory of contemporary communal violence.

A second problem of the existing literature is the singular focus on religion. Communal conflict in India has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention, but comparatively little consideration has been given to violence occurring along caste or tribal lines. This is a serious oversight, considering that these forms of conflict are prevalent throughout modern India. Thousands of atrocities are committed against members of the untouchable castes every year, and the Naxalite rebellion in eastern India was described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the largest security threat in the history of the country. To broaden the scope of existing scholarship on ethnic conflict in India, this book offers a more comprehensive account, examining religious, caste, and tribal conflict together. In doing so, it highlights that most caste and tribal violence in contemporary India descends from the policies of colonial officials who discriminated against low castes and tribal groups. Importantly, this book also shows that religious violence had different causes and was prevalent even before colonialism.

Excerpt from The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India: Verghese, Ajay

Historical context

During the late 1400’s to early 1500’s, a new figure appeared in the philosophical tradition under the name of Raghunatha Siromani. He was a brahmin of ordinary origin with a point of interest, except for the fact that his grandfather, Sulapani, wrote a minor commentary about a Sanskrit Smriti. He studied at a university in Mithila that was the centre for Brahmanical learning, and he even went on to be a chancellor at the institution; however, he found it to be too conservative and chose to return to his original home in what is modern-day Nadia in West Bengal. This hometown was part of the Bengal sultanate that was presently ruled by the liberal minded Hussain Shah, who multiplied institutions in Brahmanical ones. In this open environment, Raghunatha would go on to rewrite the entire field of logic and indirectly begin what can be considered the earliest forms of Modernity within South Asia. 

Before we go any further, we need to understand what Raghunatha’s works were and conduct a broader examination of their social implications for the time. Also, I will be abbreviating Raghunatha Shiromani with the initials RS for the rest of this discussion to make it easier to write.

Skepticism and Reason in the School of New Logic

Basically, RS was a part of the Navya Nyaya school of philosophy that was originally founded by Gangesa in the first half of the 14th century, when he unified the traditional school of Nyaya (logic) and Vaisheshika (metaphysics) together in his magnum opus, the “Tattvachinatmani” (Jewel of thought on the Nature of things). RS, during his lifetime, wrote multiple commentaries or Bhasya on multiple historical texts such as the Nyaya sutra, Nyayakusumanjali, and Gangesa works as well. Traditionally, the Bhasya is supposed to provide clarification about grey areas and expand on the pre-existing literature, but there was always a degree of deference to these ancient works, and one couldn’t understand the precepts that were presented.  

RS on the other hand extensively challenged a lot of these assumptions as he did a thing that the author Janardan Ganeri calls “being in a discussion with tradition”, where activity challenges some of the pre-existing states made in the work using logic and reason to ensure the arguments being presented isn’t simply considered as true due to traditional rather there is a logical basis for the points being made. What RS was doing here is shifting the onus of inquiry into the hands of the individuals and challenging the traditional norms that were previously set in place. He doesn’t reject tradition completely, but he emphasizes the need for skepticism and examination of ideas through a lens of neutrality. I am just doing a direct quote from his works, which can explain his point:

“The demonstration of these matters, which I have carefully explained, is contrary to the conclusions reached by all the other disciplines. These matters spoken of should not be cast aside without reflection just because they are contrary to accepted opinion; scholars should consider them carefully. Bowing to those who know the truth concerning matters of all the sciences, bowing to people like you [the reader], I pray you consider my sayings with sympathy. This method, though less honoured, has been employed by wise men of the past; namely that one asks other people of learning to consider one’s own words (Inquiry into the True Nature of Things 1915: 79,1-80,3; trans. Potter 1957: 89-90).”

Another notable quote of note is:

“How does it come about that, from (hearing) the word “Dasaratha,” people now, who never saw Dasaratha [the father of the legendary king Rama] come to know of him? Likewise, how, from the words [for fictional entities like] “hobgoblin”, do others come to know of them? I leave this for attentive scholars to meditate upon. I shall not expand further here. (1915: 60,4-61,4; trans. Potter 1957: 76).”

 Here he is talking about an idea that comes to mind, but instead of simply explicating this concept fully. There is an expectation that readers of the text actively engage with the idea being that they aim to inquire about these ideas themselves instead of merely taking the idea via rote memorization. The onus of inquiry is shifted into the hands of the reader, where you are actively expected to partake in a discussion with the text and the ideas being presented here. 

Furthermore, you see a similar trend in Europe, where they developed such ideas, and it led to the formation of the scientific revolution and broader advances in society. Think of how, before the enlightenment, people used to follow the Galen theory of Anatomy and Humoral theory in explaining disease, which often resulted in leeches and bloodletting. The ideas were taken as the norm for a long time, since any further investigation, such as the examination of dead corpses, but the enlightenment and the reformation shifted this dynamic. These theories gradually emerged with figures like Andreas Vesalius questioning these concepts and providing scientific proofs about how these ideas were false; most of which involved breaking deference to tradition and the norms of the time. All of this may seem mundane to us today, but it was unique in that time, and it paved the way for the scientific revolution.

 Another aspect of RS’s writing is his close connection to realist philosophy, as was common among the logicians, and his emphasis on individuality, best seen in the following quotes: 

“Among entities, space and time are nothing but God, since there is no proof [that they are distinct from God]. For wherever particular effects arise, these arise simply from God by his being combined with particular causes (1915: 1,3-3,1; trans. Potter 1957: 23).”

“The universal selfhood, insofar as it is the limitor of the inherence- causality of pleasure etc., is not in god (1915: 44,2-45,1; trans. Potter 1957: 55).”  

His argument is quite similar to the ideas presented by the European philosopher Spinoza, a type of religious deism. Basically, he argues that space and time itself is God itself and that the individual self is distinct from this god. In the traditional Vedantic view, the distinction between the atman (self) and the Ishavara-Brahaman (God/Absolute) is an illusion, indirectly saying that individuality is a product of ignorance (avidya), i.e., created by the environment you live in. RS, on the other hand, holds that not only is individuality not an illusion stemming from ignorance, but that the self and the other aspects of individuality, such as feelings, emotions, and experience, are real. Individuality is an important part of his philosophy about logic and inquiry. 

The Environment and other figures of pre-colonial Modernity 

You see the things that are commonly the basis of modernity today: individuality, questioning of tradition, openness to newer ideas, and skepticism about once-reality. What makes this form of pre-colonial modernity fascinating is the fact that it wasn’t just limited to one philosophical tradition, caste, or religion; in fact, it was quite common during the Early modern Mughal empire. Yashovijaya Gani, a logician and orthodox Jain monk, came to the same conclusions that Raghunatha came to, despite criticizing his work extensively. In fact, Yashovijaya even had a form of a prototypical science method as seen in the following quote:

“No body of ‘theory’ (śāstra), whether Jaina or non-Jaina, is to be accepted merely based on sectarian interest. Instead, the theory should be subject to testing, just as the purity of a sample of gold is determined by tests involving rubbing, cutting, and heating (1.17). There is testing a theory or idea through a continuous process, like purifying gold. 

This wasn’t even limited to the Dharmic religions, since you see a similar trend in the Islamic tradition, specifically in the figure of Dara. Even though today Dara Shikoh’s main work, the “Majhma-ul-Bahrain” (meeting of two oceans), is remembered as a text that was supposed to “unify” Islamic and Vedantic traditions, that was never a goal of the work. Dara was re-examining the traditional Islamic texts in the same way that Raghunatha Siromani was engaging with Navya Nyaya works; he was engaging in a discussion with the Islamic tradition and trying to use reason in a manner that refined pre-existing notions present in the doctrine. He himself stated that he was examining subjects not extensively discussed in traditional Islamic works and learning about how another religious tradition that confronted these ideas resolved them. Learning from them, looking at how the Islamic tradition may deal with those issues, like how RS looked at grey areas in the Metaphysics established by Gangesa, and trying to resolve them. There might be some overlap as well since Dara talked with Banaras Brahmin trained in Nyaya, Yashovijaya studied Nyaya in Ujjain and wrote commentaries on RS, as well as indirectly commented on Dara’s works sometime after his execution. 

These ideas further permeated into broader society in many ways. Like there was a style of rhetoric used by the Nyaya school called the Nyaya rhetoric, which, according to recent studies, suggests this style is used across all religious, caste, and ethnic groups in India. The emphasis on skepticism and inquiry was very common in the Mughal empire, as even European travellers noted how many administrators in the Mughal bureaucracy showed complex analytical tendencies. Even the emperors got in on this tendency, as they often default to a deeper emphasis on logic and reason as a pathway for the dispensation of legal judgments. I remember this story about how a few Rajput nobles argued with the ritualistic purity of deer meat and whether they could consume such objects, which was overheard by Shah Jahan. The emperor proceeded to give a complex explanation analytically by reconstructing a discussion using the concept of Halal. Outside of the imperial courts, you had multiple figures (religious and non-religious) actively questioning traditional norms and even the development of a sophisticated popular politics that actively challenged traditional power structures. 

The Decline of the pre-colonial alongside the rise of colonial 

Now, you might be wondering how any of this relates to modern political discussions. Well, see how pre-colonial, so it’s all going to go downhill from here. Many of RS’s writings had continued to develop after his time, as many philosophers, including European figures such as traveller Francis Bernier, translated these works into European languages. However, all of this came to a screeching halt once the Mughal empire fragments and many of these writers lost their patronage as the Sultans and Rajas lost control as political authority decayed, leading to a state of chaos and banditry. 

The British filled in the gap created by the fragmentation and went on to form a colonial state in South Asia, starting the British Raj. During the colonial period, many writers in Europe started to directly engage with the works of RS and the other philosophers; however, many of these new writers gradually started to dismiss these writings as inferior in contrast to the works of European scholars. RS and the Nyaya schools were largely dismissed as irrelevant, and the Brahmanical scholars were gradually absorbed into the colonial apparatus. The multiple famines caused by British oversight, specifically the ones in Bengal, the centre of Nyaya, naturally killed many people, including the Nyaya scholars, hence weakening their education centre and school of thought.

On the other hand, Dara’s works and his contribution didn’t do any better. For one, the works he wrote naturally got him killed by his brother for being a heretic as part of a succession dispute that was going on. Furthermore, it seems that discussing his work was somewhat limited during the period after his death, since Yashovijaya, who wrote his commentaries around the same time, didn’t mention Dara’s work explicitly but only discussed the main point of the discussion indirectly. At the same time, Yashovajaya himself is referred to as the last great philosopher of the Jain tradition.

A lot of colonial-era historiography emphasized the “fallen” nature of South Asian civilization, often beginning around the 12th century, and this shaped how many discussions about the region were conducted well into the modern era. If you open any modern book on Indian philosophy, they always stop around the 12th century and barely mention any writer that came afterwards, like Vallabha Acharya and his Suddhadvaita, or any South Asian Islamic writers. Another negative impact was how historiography greatly emphasized the “spiritual” nature of South Asia, presenting an orientalist interpretation of the land, usually through the lens of Mysticism and an overemphasis on the religious nature of society. Even today, many Western academics dispute whether South Asia had philosophy and often tie South Asian philosophy with the theology department. The last major influence was the concept of the White man’s burden of bringing (or rather “reviving” a stagnant) “civilization” to South Asia that centred Eurocentric philosophy, law, social norms, and broader practices.

The Post-Colonial Reality

The inevitable product of the colonial era is seen in the post-colonial period. Philosophy today is by default assumed to be associated with Western canonical works such as Plato or Socrates, not Raghunatha, Yashovijaya, or Dara, for that matter. This has an impact on political theory as a significant portion relies on philosophy as a base for understanding society, which resulted in a lot of the founding fathers using a lot of Eurocentric notions to create the political theory that served as the basis of most South Asian countries. What this created is a society whose ruling classes conceive of modern politics within a Western framework that centres Eurocentric cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the ground-level societal reality. Like a platinum statue with a head of bronze. The inevitable product is multiple blind spots in discussions that I vaguely discussed in another comment about paranoia and Indian left-wing politics that I will paste below:

“I understand the paranoia that you are talking about here, but I don’t think it’s exclusive to Hindus at all; rather, it seems to be an Indian thing. Like I have been in many online spaces with a wide variety of people ranging from Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, in addition to people from both the Left and Right. Almost a significant portion of people in these areas are oddly paranoid a lot of the time, to the extent that some of them have just started making conspiracy theories about the other groups. I wouldn’t say this is a phenomenon limited to South Asia, since the same things have happened in Western spaces as well. It’s not just a you thing, rather it is a lot more common than you can imagine. 

In terms of your college experiences, well, I can explain why you feel the same way by sharing a particular experience from my own college years. So, I studied at a Canadian university, and I happened to take a class on Afrofuturism in my 3rd year. It was an entire class that explicitly discussed racial politics in the context of science fiction with close references to Marxism, Feminism, Post Modernism, Intersectionality, and your generic progressive frameworks for analysis. Through that entire course, I got to experience how these theories were originally interpreted and used within the original Western cultural setting as their original author intended. A lot of these ideas, while useful in understanding society, are often discussed and written by authors who lived in European settings. There is always this underlying assumption of universality to a lot of concepts that are heavily Europe-centric in some sense. Like a lot of class discussions in Marxism centred quite heavily on how class works in the context of Early Modern Europe. 

India has completely different cultural structures that separate it from Europe, which means that a significant portion of those frameworks has to be changed in order to avoid making Eurocentric assumptions about a society that is non-European. For example, caste creates a situation where social, economic, and political capital aren’t shared by the same group, like how race in the West causes a singular group (Caucasian) to control all those capitals. In India, Vaishyas or Mercantile Jatis like Jains, Zoroastrians, Baniya, etc., control commerce, but that doesn’t translate to direct political power that agriculturalists like Yadav yield via electoral processes due to numerical superiority. 

Caste isn’t consistent either, since a Jaati dominant in one state might be marginalized in another state, hence there are a lot of contextual differences that you need to account for. However, most Indian left-leaning individuals fail at this since they take this framework whole without meaningful consideration of cultural differences. It’s kind of the basic reason why caste discussion purely centres around Brahmin vs Dalit, but doesn’t account as much about every other group in between, since these two varnas are the only consistent ones from one region to another. Like I have read Indian feminist blogs where the writer tries to transplant Western feminist ideas wholesale into an Indian context, and there is a visible mismatch since the West is a post-industrialized state, while India is still in the early stages of Industrialization. There is a very clear social and political reality that is different. 

Additionally, this creates another problem as well, since most of these authors do not use a cultural language that is comprehensible to ordinary Indians, as they wholesale transplanted these ideas without considering the audience’s background. Like India has a specific style of rhetoric called the Nyaya method that is quite commonly used here, but also extensively in a Western background. If you don’t consciously pay attention to rhetoric, it affects how audiences feel about the subject matter.

Another factor I should mention here would be the fact that Western academia is still somewhat haunted by the legacy of oriental historiography. Many of the early studies done about India were often done by British Orientalists who presented a notion of India being a static, unchanging society steeped in spiritualism. Even Karl Marx had a concept called “Asiatic mode of production”, which is a stupid concept that is steeped in orientalism. The only person who seemed to argue extensively against this tide was Max “one of the founders of sociology” Weber, who argued that things like caste were a product of material conditions rather than religion, which didn’t get popular until much later on. 

Even post-colonial historians who tried to decolonize Indian history ended up kind of being in the shadow of oriental scholarship since they rejected a lot of aspects (many that were bad) from orientalist scholars, but that involved rejecting the pre-colonial elements in these works. Think of how Hinduism is a name given by the colonial officials to the present-day religion. Many post-colonial scholars reject this identification since it was an orientalist category placed on a complex tradition. However, Hinduism was already crystallizing into a clear religion before the British, and by rejecting the label wholesale, you end up rejecting the pre-colonial aspect. None of this includes the underlying assumption that the non-Hindu groups were any different. There was a lot of fluidity between religious identities and grey areas that often got missed.

Now, Western academia has definitely improved a lot in more recent times, and academics have attempted to overcome these assumptions. However, most lay left or right leaning person has access to any of these works, and they mainly rely on older, trashier works that are deeply outdated. When I was at university, I was told that work that is more than 5-10 years old is outdated, and you have people referencing works from the 1800’s. God, this shit annoys me so much. The result is very obvious: you have a bunch of people referencing outdated material that isn’t relevant in academia today, and the legacy of colonial historiography has created a lot of questionable assumptions about Indian society.

This leads to an entirely missing perspective, which creates a social grey that makes an information desert. For example, Orientalist assumptions make it seem as if Hindus are the only ones who have caste in India, and other groups like Muslims lack or have a weakened form of caste. If you look at caste from a material rather than an orientalist perspective, this wouldn’t exist. This makes a blind spot for cross-religious caste tensions that implode in everyone’s face, and we don’t understand anything, leading to a lot of missing information and paranoia with things like “would so and so community cause this violence, what happens if they gain power, etc.” The paranoia comes from things not fully adding up or clear explanations.

Honestly, everything I said isn’t unique or new to me. I literally use intersectionality and other leftist ideas, but I accounted for orientalism, cultural differences, and used Indian philosophical ideas to explain it in a manner you can understand culturally. I explain things poorly, but I am presenting a new idea or giving nuance; rather, I am trying to bring a clearer picture hidden underneath the exterior appearance. Also, the new political polarization has only made so many of these problems worse, and even I am having a hard time keeping up with these discussions these days.”

Another impact that colonial era practice has on South Asia is the manner in which modernity as a concept is understood by people today. There is a strong association of modernity as being something that is representative of “Western” civilization in contrast to the traditional “Eastern” civilization, to the extent that people consider concepts such as queerness and gender equality as “Western” concepts that are being imported into and to an extent “ruining” the East. Even the notion of challenging traditional institutions is something that is an extension of westernization to such an extent that people use Western symbols and terminology to explain these ideas, like how people use the term LGBT instead of expanding and further developing pre-existing ideas or terms like Hijra to express those ideas in a culturally comprehensible manner to the lay population. Modernity is something that is imported from external land and forced onto the people, rather than being seen that has an organic historical basis in the land and was something that developed internally rather than externally. Like Yashovijay, RS, and Dara were working within their own orthodox, often conflicting, frameworks, yet organically came to similar ideas before European influence arrived. 

The result of all these practices is a political elite that tries to force a form of Eurocentric modernity that requires the ground-level population to change their entire outlook on life to obtain any form of advancement. This inevitability will lead to a backlash as people double down on their pre-existing hierarchical and discriminatory practices out of fear of losing their sense of identity and self. On the opposite end, people who can adopt an Eurocentric system of modernity find themselves losing their traditional ideas and being forced to navigate society using Western cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the social reality of the society they live within. They naturally feel isolated, suffering social loneliness, and attempt to return to a now weakening traditional identity, which puts them on a trajectory leading to ethnoreligious nationalism. 

A good example is the issue with open defecation in India. The main issue with defecation practices in India was often affected by two aspects: a material issue and a social issue. Materially, people didn’t have access to latrines to conduct their business, so the government compensated and decided to build latrines for people, which resulted in a reduction. However, this didn’t completely translate over since India still had a somewhat open defecation and even relapses into such practices, which was driven by social practices that had been embedded in the land over time, and one that didn’t account for. For the political class (both left and right), they mainly saw the latrine issue more from a material perspective and didn’t really understand the fact that there was an entire culture around this practice due to a normal cultural disconnect. People literally had actual toilets built into their homes, yet they still did open defecation because they weren’t provided a clear explanation that would work within their cultural framework.

The second example stems from this study (I have been trying to find for a long time on JSTOR, but I haven’t yet), which talked about the rise of Hindutva and urban practices. The author noted that a rise in urbanization led to a breakdown of traditional caste identities, which weakened over time, resulting in a loss of community, so everyone gradually turned to religious institutions. This strengthening of religious communities led to a gradual revivalism and the broader expansion of ethnoreligious nationalism that came alongside. The sense of identity loss and community that was foundational identity led them to other entities (I believe temples with connections to Hindutva groups like the RSS), closely affiliated with ethnoreligious nationalism, to fill in that void. 

The end of the organic form of pre-colonial modernity in South Asia and its replacement by a forced form of post-colonial modernity across the political spectrum has hindered the forward process, resulting in the region being very backwards. Compare this to East Asia, which was able to transition organically from the pre-modern to the post-modern since they weren’t as extensively ruled by colonial powers, and it mostly adapted aspects of the European Enlightenment alongside the aesthetic appearance without losing its sense of identity. Like Japan, “Westernized” during the Meiji reformation, but maintained a lot of their practices to the extent that modern scholars question the westernization narrative. Even though China had things like the cultural revolution still retains a lot of aspects from the pre-modern era, since communism was embedded within the pre-existing cultural landscape without fully displacing it to the extent that neo-Confucianism is seeing a revival there. Hence, the adage: Communism with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to ignore a clear power dynamic between East Asia and the West that forced Eurocentric notions onto the region, but it didn’t elicit the same backlash as it had in South Asia, since a pre-existing form of modernity to guide it. Nonetheless, South Asia was never able to make that transition organically without the negative impact of colonialism and lost its own prototypical modernity on the way.

Bibliography:

Ganeri, Jonardon. “Raghunātha Śiromaṇi and the Origins of Modernity in India.” Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Sambhaea , 2013. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18999/SAMBH.30.55. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. “The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yaśovijaya Gaṇi.” International Journal of Jaina Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 1–11. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. The lost age of reason: Philosophy in early modern india 1450-1700. New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 2011. 

Takhelchangbam, Nilima D., Deepanshi Saxena, Divyata Sachan, Pankaj K. Jain, Sushil K. Shukla, Dhiraj K. Srivastava, and Prashant K. Bajpai. “Barriers of Household Toilet Utilization among Toilet Owners in a Rural Area of Northern India: An Analytical Cross-Sectional Study.” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 12, no. 9 (2023): 1984–90. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_515_23.