In Conversation with J Sai Deepak| Part 1| India that is Bharat

[Music] [Music] to yet another episode of india this week uh gives us a great honor and pleasure to have j sai deepak join us today for a discussion on his bestseller india that is bharat coloniality civilization and constitution and easily from most of our viewers it's been a request for months now to have him and we feel really great to have him namaste and welcome namaste namaste thank you for having me on your show most people would be surprised that i'm on your show i don't know why i don't think they should be surprised at all they should have happened long ago we are glad uh most important question because i mean since you're gaining such prominence now in the last few years what does jay stand in jail so here's a very cast east response okay so i'm a tamil brahman in fact there is a going feud among telugu's and tamilians as to whether i'm at a million or telugu okay so let me end that question once for all i'm a fourth generation bhagyanagari tamilan okay so i come from bhaganagar which is otherwise known as infamously hyderabad and as far as we are concerned the tradition is that the father's first names first letter becomes your initial right okay so j is uh is for my father's name and therefore it is j said okay so most people actually uh in in this part of the country they get flammoxed at the particular order because they're used they call it so in the south it is j deepak sai and deepak are not the first name and the last name they are two first names and j is my last name which becomes my initial all right i've seen that with a lot of my tamron friends who are acquainted with that uh starting today i mean of course we're gonna be talking about your best seller which has been like topping the charts in the last one year and we are at the cusp of your second book launching on tuesday so it's a great timing that way uh starting with the introduction itself uh you know you speak on page number one itself that in the year 2004 you could observe that there was open hostility directed at specific index sub identities especially in academic campuses now this is very unique because you know being products of consuming knowledge from you know the news from the likes of communist portals to us also certain civilizational truths started making sense only a few years back but what is it that you could see all this in 2004 itself where a lot of us were still under a lot of propaganda and you had a particular government who drove the narrative so what is it that you could see a decade before itself in 2004 so the thing is uh i am a product i'm a kid of the 90s so if you ask me what are the landmarks that have shaped my thinking significantly i was seven years old on 6th of december 1992 okay then there were riots in hyderabad where it was difficult to melt get even a packet of milk because of massive curfews and old city of hyderabad is almost 50 percent of the city of hyderabad both in terms of size and population okay so there were massive disturbances okay and the reason it became particularly painful was because it was in december that we have the uh festival of of uh karthika masam which is a specific month which is celebrated by most people in the south and even in the north invariably it would coincide with what they call the black day okay and we would not be allowed to burst firecrackers okay i have lived in muslim dominated localities of hyderabad okay where we would not be allowed to celebrate either bharat's victory at uh let's say in cricket and there would be firecrackers burst uh at the victory of pakistan and we were heavily outnumbered if i would come out as a child and this would be in the year 95 so i was 10 years old if i would come out to burst firecrackers not for let's say the cricket victory or anything else but to celebrate our festivals we'll be saying s okay so this has happened so uh then followed by that was of course the kargil war okay and people of hyderabad at least the conscious ones would tell you of the treatment received when the bodies of soldiers were coming to hyderabad and followed by the cargill war in 2001 september 11th there was a particular library which i used to frequent uh run by a muslim gentleman uh it was called the khan library and this is very close to there is no need for me to even fabricate facts here there is a place called kishore takis right next to it was the khan library previously it doesn't exist anymore and there is a mosque close to that particular library okay huge mobs had gathered on the uh on 11th of september 2001 okay um and uh in fact uh unnecessary conversations we are wondering what has this got to do with the people here okay so this was the language that we heard okay so 2004 was not a sudden change it was not as if i was suddenly becoming becoming aware of my identity and the problems here we have witnessed a lot of things as children and dare i say this and i'm sure you'll be able to relate to this the children of the 90s are the ones who are currently leading the indie renaissance because we are much more historically aware we are much more conscious of the issues on the campus we have faced a lot of this in different parts of let's say let's say faces of our lives at different places so in 2004 you have to realize that the india shining campaign bombed and flopped like nobody's business okay contrary to the hype which was generated the failure was extraordinary okay although the difference between the number of seats that the congress and the bjp one wasn't too much okay but ethernet hype generated it almost bombed like the bengal election campaign of the bjp that is the closest example that i come to okay now who was the partner of the bjp at uh in tamil nadu admk okay aiadmk she had lost in all 39 constituencies okay when she loses her so-called brahmin identity becomes the focus of the loss because she comes from a family of mysore tamil against okay and therefore at the time of loss it becomes very very critical that the brahman identity becomes the focus of attention prior to that or maybe just after that i think uh when i was in engineering only on the day of deepavali the shankaracharya of kanjima gets arrested on diwali ultimately to be acquitted of the framed and trumped up charges as followers of kanshimat we were all saddled for us it was much more than the black day because a 2 500 year old institution was dragged in the mug by a so-called brahmin who was in power so when people say that brahmins voted for uh jail they don't understand we certainly held her to account for all this and importantly the consumer has never been just a brahmin following institution muslims visit the kanchi mud most people don't know this so under the uh the previous matapati or the previous previous mathematic swami chandrasekhari was known as the mahapariba who is known to have contributed to article 26 of the constitution okay when muslims would visit he would not offer the kumkum or the vibhuti because he would offer the sandalwood because sandalwood is is is particular for muslims in the south okay so he would say you don't have to change your ways here is that that's that would be the tradition there okay so considering that we were the product of this entire generation so in 2004 adm k lost i mean mr vajpayee lost and those who are vocal about all of this on the campus we had very severe repercussions on the campus okay so um to pull off otherwise that would have happened okay but since i would wear the vibhuti or the tikka very very prominently they would come and wipe it off a nasty wild vulgar chants against brahmins are let's say hindutvatis now both not necessarily being the same okay and since i have grown up in hyderabad i don't share the silence of the tamil brahmin community in hyderabad and i'd be very vocal about it because the go-to response in tamil nadu was to shut up because they're outnumbered maximum population the foreign of brahmins from tamil nadu is a lesser known aspect of hindu genocide which was undertaken by the dk and successor dmk so with all this history 2004 was very very traumatic okay now that's when i ultimately realized that here is an instance where we are fighting amongst ourselves despite being members of the same community since when did this fisher start and who is responsible for contributing to it and has this always existed has this animus between let's say these strands of the hindu community always existed these were my questions one of the things that i chose to do was not to be a mute spectator who reads the hindu minds about the hindu okay and i wanted to actively contribute to it but with some qualification and therefore the move towards law ultimately as a choice of career so 2004 according to me was if not the over it was not an overnight change but it was certainly a tipping point um foreign foreign is i was just thinking about the same thank you because then the reference becomes immediately foreign which has its uh connections and they don't realize what kind of contributions have been made to the other aspects foreign because if you look at let's say the creation of germany the germanic identity preceded the creation of germany the unification of germany i think in 1871 by ottoman bismarck this was i mean it was effectively the product of the existence of an identity before the pakistani mindset precedes the creation of pakistan it is not just about religion this is about the history of human civilization and bharata as a civilization because it records our journey usually so imagine the seriousness of cutting off a sacred thread when a man is walking okay it's as bad as let's say pulling off a turban of a sikh or even worse for that matter okay so when we do this ceremony it's not a function it's a ceremony we actually speak of three things and ultimately it is it is said that it is because of the jumbled trees which is why jammu gets its name from that's where the origin of bharat is is is a reference to a political entity which is identified by civilization it has been going on for thousands of years it is an unbroken tradition despite islamic invasions despite christian conversions this has been going on therefore when you say this and and there was another interview i think where uh taran vijayji was there on ndtv and there was this christian anchor i forget her name she has a bobcat okay so she basically says mahabharata you have reduced it to mythology effectively translates to this is how it happened thus it happened and you're telling us that it's all mythology and when you say all of this the broad notion that you've effectively created is everything that we believe as a community is the product of imagination it's a figment of fiction says that will be decided at the end of the trilogy so i'm at the very least saying that there is some degree of awareness and consciousness right that's the point right uh building up on that uh jay you speak on page 14 about your admiration for the united civilization aside simple okay uh building on that on page 14 you speak about you know admiration for your nine civilizational icons like swami vivekananda and sri aurobindo and you say that it was clear to you that recasting bharat in the mould of west would kill its originality and character making it a mere weasel of the west that too after the european colonizer had left its uh shows uh this would be a tragedy of incalculable proportions for which we would have no one to blame but ourselves so if you could just elaborate a little on that ugly he which is a representation of mindset in sanskrit and hindi so we are looking at university and not upanime is why are you crying now who is responsible for the change now why haven't you changed you haven't changed because the gory sahib has left leaving the brown sides here so the through language through public discourse through pop culture that is what i'm looking at uh [Music] colonialism foreign okay then you have surrogate colonialism where effectively one group is used as exploiters on behalf of the other in one particular sense therefore the concept of surrogacy becomes let's say very clear key you use one foreign element to exploit another foreign element with the third foreign element being the exploited and the second foreign element being foreign m that would be the way of looking at internal colonism my entire assessment of bharath's history has been more from the perspective of two waves of settler colonialism that it i could be wrong here but there are examples where perhaps even kanishka for that matter is seen as coming from those parts which are seen as parts of china or tibet at this point okay but okay or for that matter several kingdoms even in let's say cambodia and all these places we see them as part of the extended bharatiya sanctuary as part of greater bharat kyogri also you go on to say now i'll go to page 42 you quote a acclaimed writer scholar according to cujano this is where the true genius of the european colonizer lay not in the brutal economic and political repression of the native but in successfully projecting his way of life as the aspirational ideal now this is very interesting side because while one reads your book there's so much that one starts relating okay this is what where i was in life and all and confession coming from one of the top missionary schools of pune i would subconsciously look down upon anyone who have food fed that yeah you know english so he can be my friend and it took me a lot of time to you know challenge that bias of mine but that remains then i saw it a different way when i would go to you know kashmir and then i would see there people wanting to aspire speaking in hindi you know and they would look down upon that and i felt my god this is so tragic at these relative levels and uh that's where all of us right urban kids have always wanted to be like that cool dude and friends and all i'm not saying it's wrong but at the same time look down upon and you know it's funny in the 90s the one who would wear the more western floats in the hindi film industry they were aspirational like the shahrukh khan and that's fine but everybody would go and watch a govinda movie but they were just saying that's a very deep thing because the guy was a brilliant actor but it was more like that's not cool you know but it's but at a very deeper level it is actually very intellectual to very deep becomes the chief minister for that one day and he enters the vidhan sabha assembly what does he wear he he wears a trouser and a full sleeve shirt it's a formal purpose right okay is supposed to be among the one of the most rooted directors of tamil okay this gentleman added a dialogue in tamil because that's where the movie was made from he said oh finally we have an educated watch this so corruption is associated with the bhartiya attire modern forward progressive thinking is associated with a certain problem that is the success of the european colonizer okay i'll give you a better example and which is a much more painful example uh a telugu movie recently came out called sham singh haroy okay one of the deadliest movies made by the christian missionary left according to me extremely devastating brilliantly made but diabolically made okay so what they do is the brahman evil brahman is the villain the bald heads up traditional the devadasi dress is the focal point of the movie who comes and reforms the centaur village an educated christian youngster who comes and saves the devatasi from the evil brahmin to the point of effectively giving the impression that the brahmin violates the modesty of the devdasi in the temple apparently this is lifted directly from missionary literature of the 18th and 19th century it is a direct lift from it but because we don't understand history enough we don't realize that this was the very same allegation made in greece and rome before it was christianized to say that those temples are places of debauchery and sacred prostitution that is the language that is imported subsequently for the devadasi culture okay and this movie people were going gaga over oh yeah movie movie and this is made in the telugu industry which made bahubali and arara because this shows the now growing infiltration of the left and the christian marxist let's say uh group in the telugu film industry also tamil film industry has been completely taken over okay the point i'm trying to make is that academics representation effectively shows the third layer of percolation starts with education moves to politics then khan khan finally visual representation which is media how many people are comfortable eating with their hands why is that a problem i am exactly the point it is it has now become something that you pay for only to eat at itc bukhara in delhi in every other place you are asking for a cutlery okay therefore according to me the difference that i have tried to come out in the book is the invader or the colonizer who preceded the christian european colonizer was brutal in his repression and was very very visceral and direct in his depression from the jizya to let's say destruction of temples to molestation to slave trade and everything it was in your face and therefore the reaction was equally visceral and physical he forced you to draw the sword and respond okay the guy who comes later starts with the mantra of toleration and toleration means i will tolerate you until you gradually convert so the balkanization of bharat from within in the northeast in let's say in kerala now in andhra pradesh in several parts of tamilnadu in kanyakumari district in the district all these are representations of using the aspirational model for conversion right what is the distinction then i also want to make the point that the subsequent islamist movements adopted the very same strategy of the christian european colonizer and they started using the aspirational model as opposed to using the direct violence model that's right that's where i gradually move and that is what i'm showing through the second book foreign [Music] that language has been reproduced and foreign evangelism so enlightenment did not create respect for indigenous communities foreign they are so less or they have dark souls that is how they go about it okay like destroying the amazon or the forest and so on and so forth you should only look at the manner in which that racist rudyard kipling effectively represents full of rivers and jungles to look at bhara that way i am not anti-development let me correct that notion i am not anti-development i repeat this ad nauseam i'm not a luddite who says there can't be any progress but progress came up it is as hot as delhi which was never the case before people need fans there landslides i think there are about six power projects which are destroying the ecosystem of the place in himachal pradesh people used to survive on the the brooks and the waterfalls so those places where there was no water scarcity now has water scarcity most of the mountainous places whether it's the right and there are very few places where you where you can go with let's say roads you have massive four lane ways six lane ways coming about just travel from chandigarh to shimla i go there almost once in two months for arguments in the himachal high court and it's a painful journey it's a very dramatic journey from okay and we are putting artificial embankments there which are not able to bear the weight of the soil and then starts okay see the point is you keep increasing road access other than military access because it is on the border it is a sensitive state and all that then you are encouraging more city dwellers to come there in all their vehicles and you are encouraging locals to create more hotels more stays okay and all of us get sucked into the same trap and once you're part of that and your livelihood becomes dependent on that um in addition after the british man has left you are mainstreaming aryan innovation theory as part of not just your academic discourse but as part of your development business very interesting assign coming to page number 64 what was very interesting for me as a reader was that this whole childhood notion of mine of christopher columbus the great one of the greatest voyagers you turned it on its head with arguments rooted in facts and writings from that side that the whole exploration had a strong underpinning of his basically to do with his religious outlook of how he had to spread the faith and you know civilize these savage policies that was very interesting and i would want the readers to know that because you have act i don't know if anybody has challenged that in the mainstream before that you know with such academic curriculum so the best part is my book is as unoriginal as it gets all right literature that is okay who are preventing the access to this literature so my entire strategy made the book has been very simple why don't you see that we are trying to protect what is left of us right so the idea was to present that literature now what hindus i would say or bharathiya so to speak have to learn is the african-american success in talking about their pain and their trauma she was the one who said you know the indian system fairly well above us okay so the entire point was one of the let's say risky strategies behind the book was primary sources extract even to the point of making it a difficult read that's what you've done in the case of christmas yes what happened was um i had sent the book for a review by vikram sampat asking him to take a look at it okay he's a very dear friend and one of the things that he said was say you have taken a words such as old world new world christian world third world first world year it starts with the division of the world between the spanish empire and the portuguese empire for colonization foreign [Laughter] the truth bombs here in this book and the literature is first for the hindu child or the hindu parent that read this before you feed poison to your children personally this is like universally accepted discussions this is a very dear thing to her now she always tells me to see how great the separation and you know always talks about that i just want to add that to personal thing to it hello okay which is to say i have compared shah valiullah del avi's understanding of the division between the world of the ulema and the world of the case and i have compared that said okay and when he finally abolished the concept of the caliphate from turkey with constant comparisons to the first book because first book is my so-called master conceptual template [Music] okay through specific instances now to answer your question again in regards to the enlightenment my book is again unoriginal because i have cited three specific rather two specific authors one is jacobi rover to bala gangadhar but in addition to that i have referred to german scholars and english scholars of law and enlightenment who are basically saying nobody was fighting for de-churchification of the christian society they were fighting for better and enlightened certification of the christian society the monasteries not even the church okay amongst johan they were practicing christian values better than the church when the church was completely embroiled in corruption scandals and sex scandals okay so okay then how the church goes about appropriating the monks as part of their order because monks were leading the democratization of christian theology which was undermining the monopoly of the church that is from the 12th century finally then when martin luther comes then effectively he says to hell with it okay you can't be the ones so the very system of confessions the very system of grant of apologies and all that everything was being questioned finally after the reformation when you connect the dots between catholic movement then reformation then reformation to protest to no it means a specific deity is my position okay you want to call it god because you want to expand the scope of its reach so that more people accept it and see it as universal and therefore everybody has to accept it but i am saying it has a specific deity there is a specific position there that the only consecrated place in earth is the kaaba that's your position in which case you can't take a secular approach it is a very specific religious approach it's a denominational approach the very it was during enlightenment that the possession was even more concretized the colonization the leading scholars of enlightenment were the advocates of colonization i've given that with their own language so so they clearly said we will not use the sword but we will use the sword of the bible to initiate conversion in the spirit of the man what is the difference end result is it a coincidence that enlightenment was uh was coinciding or overlapping with the peak of colonization i don't even have the dignity of sharing space on the same table where the world of values is being discussed where the question of universal values is being discussed so it's not a value that is that is universal it has been universalized topage has something all right so there is a difference between a universality of a value and universalization of a value i am saying colonization led to universalization of a local value that's very interesting and that's actually given amanda a lot to think about fortunately these are not my thoughts i'm saying what they are saying i think this can be a different subject in itself and uh debate again you know that got me to my you know teenage days uh which a lot of us get i was four years at melbourne and i'm not saying a good section of them but a certain section of them if they would speak about india and i always had this thing i would you know praise it market rate i would say you know it's been a great childhood i've grown up with so you know friends from six major faiths and it's a very normal thing and you know i've never felt anything of that sort and it's a fascinating place to grow and then would come that one thing to puncture me always but you guys are poor how's the poverty you know and uh but i've always believed in giving it back so i would i remember once i was doing this night shift as a watchman and i said to him but i feel sad for what you've done to aboriginals here do you feel bad for that and the guy turned red you know so uh you again mentioned that and that you know it's always i've seen that i'm and this is not a generalization of this but it's a mindset thing that i'm tackling here that ultimately they like that indian more who is like ready to put those jokes on himself and self-depreciating to the point of this and presenting self-loathing as some sort of you know enlightenment whereas you can be comfortable saying these are our problems but these are the things which are unique and you've spoken about the same thing you know once they colonized us and then they say and now you know you should come to our first world country standards but you want to tell them dude wanted your ancestors who did that right so uh speak about that because a lot of people will relate to that the pop culture reference the success of comedians like veerdas if it all their success is attributable to this self-replicating tendency through the as far as the indian consciousness is concerned he is acceptable because he is willing to effectively show us in very poor light which conforms to the stereotypes about bharat outside snake chambers okay these are the kind of jibes now foreign the existence of the natives of this country and the unbroken traditions even to date is proof of the fact of the strength of the spiritual strength of this community compared to the maoris compared to the africans compared to new zealanders compared to latin americans i or even for that matter persians where is persia where is persians today now they their only scope for resistance if you read that history is how do we show a resistance to islam we will not adopt sunni islam we will appear we will adopt islam these are the only two options left for the persians to show the resistance for colonization after the islamic conquest of iran right we have our language left of a problem it foreign created in the 1800s what kind of a movement it has seen in uttar pradesh or rather in united provinces in bihar and other places and why is it that telangana telugu is different from the andhra telugu i'll tell you what the politics was i'm from hyderabad so i know what exactly happened the nizam told people you will not learn telugu farsi became the language for all the people there so these people dakhni as well as telangana urdu have huge smatterings of urdu because of this imposition and that created the fissure between the andhra telugu and the telangana telugu because the andhra is relatively free because the nizam territories were not there another territory fell under madras presidency okay so nizam's territory included this some parts of karnataka some parts of madhya pradesh some parts of maharashtra and some parts of current telangana so those portions you'll find that the language is very different and you will find certain words common in all these places we don't say we say yeah and that's common in maharashtra that's common in parts of telangana close to maharashtra in all these places which has now gradually become the nutshell built and has always been the nuxel build so considering this the point that i have made here through this particular portion is to say the literature clearly shows the extent of massive poverty and the number of famines that we have seen we only know the famines of the 19th century sannyasi rebellion is okay most people are not even aware of it 1757 is the battle of baku plassi 1764 is the battle of boxer 1770 the famine has started in bengal why bengal because that's where the british power started so therefore poverty to a significant extent especially after 300 years of massive loot is to be attributed to youth [Music] this is where saying dr thorur's book on the era of darkness is great from the perspective of economics but in my criticism of his book when i told it to him in his face during the debate economics and politics are the most superficial layers of exploitation so here i have cited the work of arthur escobar where i've clearly said when he says development to change the way you see yourself in trade negotiations as someone who has participated in certain let's say uh international business discussions on trade secrets because i'm fundamentally an intellectual property a lawyer whenever you have a discussion with let's say representatives from the west especially usdrk representations are it's called everything that you have is a product of loot the land is a load the property is a loot everything is a loot so there i have a harmonization they basically say we need to have global standards what are global standards those standards that conform to u.s private interests and uk private interests and european private interests are global standards so global world kitchen they're talking of europe and united states period that's it i know this first hand so they can bluff the i mean they can talk about this to anyone who doesn't know how trade negotiations work i've seen them from a government perspective and i've also seen them from a private perspective okay i'll give you a simple example foreign that's why the phones have a handshake the technology is laid down by the former post and telegraph office of france which is now known as european telecommunications standards institutes [Music] this is why you should not look at innovation or mnc's purely from the perspective of economics they play a crucial role in geopolitics which has become very evident today i'm not your next state but i would also i am saying that is the case in which case what are the fetters so you know what the french and let's say the swiss and others are primarily fighting for cheese and vines because that is their primary export we had to pass these legislations to protect us so i am not saying don't protect but don't speak from both sides of your mouth so which is why i'm saying every country has to look out for itself [Music]

Channel: India This Week By Amana & Khalid

Views: 103,269

Keywords: India that is bharat, AminaBegam, amana begam ansari, Khalid, Khalid Baig, Khalid amana, Sai Deepak, Hindutva, traditional, decoloniality, decolonism, reform, current affair, J Sai Deepak

Id: ZF20V-ijG-U

Length: 65min 18sec (3918 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022