This faith-based binary informed their consciousness and rendered them largely inattentive to the existentially organic nature of social life, which accommodates difference without necessarily translating it into antagonism. What was a matter of conscious design, however, was the systematic marking of social roles and identities in oppositional terms and the deliberate placement of one against the other. This is not to say that injustices or conflicts did not exist, for they were absent nowhere then and are absent nowhere even now. Only the influence of deepening humanistic ideas and practices has mitigated such conditions, in proportion to their reach and impact.
What colonial rule systematically did was to instrumentalise even minor or latent differences and amplify them into sites of conflict. This enabled the regime to act as the guardian-arbiter among contending subjects, keeping people absorbed in internal antagonisms and rendering them largely oblivious to the regime’s own designs, which culminated in moral degradation and widespread impoverishment.
In pre-colonial times, India possessed a relatively effective moral order, and despite many odds, an organic way of life broadly prevailed. This organicity did not imply the absence of hierarchy or tension, but it did provide integrating norms that restrained social fragmentation and limited the escalation of conflict.
When a group of Indian intellectuals later adopted socialism as a liberative “science,” they largely carried forward this conflict-centred, binary mode of social understanding. Though they identified a different division of society into two classes, one that had little correspondence with the historically evolved social reality, they nonetheless legitimised social categorisation primarily in antagonistic terms.
It is the task of the Indian knowledge system to overcome this colonially induced epistemic legacy and to recover the conditions of an organic social understanding.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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