J. Sai Deepak

Protecting a civilisation in the age of mercantilism and global citizenship

July 3, 2020

Earlier this week, the Indian Government banned 59 mobile applications of Chinese origin invoking its powers under the Information Technology Act 2000. The ban, which is seen as part of Bharat’s retaliatory measures against Chinese aggression at the border, has initiated certain serious conversations and debates both in public and...

Bharat, China and civilisational conviction

June 26, 2020

From the first week of May this year, the Sino-Bharat standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh has hogged the news cycle despite the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, rightly so. While experts on the subject are better placed to comment on the goings-on at the border, this...

Civilisationalism and Ethnocentrism: What’s the Difference?

June 19, 2020

Last October, this author was invited to take part in a public debate at a leading National Law School in Southern India (not “South India”) on the topic “Do We Need a Nation-Wide NRC?”. The debate, a video of which is available on YouTube for public consumption, was organised in...

India that is Bharat

June 12, 2020

In the previous piece, this author had contended that the use of (a) “ancient land” to refer to this country in the Objectives Resolution of January 22, 1947 by the Constituent Assembly, and (b) “Bharat” in Article 1 as a synonym for “India”, was proof that the framers of the...

Bharat: An Indic Civilisation State

June 5, 2020

In the last piece, this author had presented a broad summary of historian Radhakumud Mookerji’s book The Fundamental Unity of India to understand how indigenous scholarly voices, which existed well before 1947, saw Bharat. In reading and interpreting works of history, it is critical to understand that history has always...

The Rediscovery of Bharat

May 29, 2020

In the previous piece in this series, this author had promised to examine the narrative presented by Indic voices in relation to the indigenous identity of Bharat and its fundamental unity as the basis of its statehood, and contrast it with the treatment of such voices by the colonisers as...

Restoring the Indigenous Gaze

May 22, 2020

Be it an individual or a people, neither must cede or surrender to an external entity the inherent and hence fundamental right to self-definition or self-determination. To give up this most intimate form of agency is to externalise the locus of one’s consciousness and its most tangible product–a crystallised identity....

The Nation State, Decoloniality and the Non-Nation State

May 15, 2020

For quite a few decades now, decoloniality has emerged in Latina America as a powerful critique of the Eurocentric or Western-centric nature of the Post-colonial discourse. Broadly, as a construct, decoloniality posits that despite legal and physical decolonization of former colonies, overt and subconscious coloniality: (a) persists in the State...

Reclaiming a civilisational approach to the Constitution?

May 8, 2020

Last November, India celebrated 70 years of the adoption of its Constitution, which by itself ought to have led to a renewed interest in the document, its origins, nature, journey, current status and the way forward. What made such a discussion even more imperative were the landmark changes effected to...

«1...3 4 5