J. Sai Deepak's decoloniality

 Bloomsbury, India, published Supreme Court advocate J. Sai Deepak's  India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilization, Constitution in 2021. Two further volumes are due to appear. I imagine the book is selling briskly because Deepak is an engaging and incisive debater familiar to TV audiences.

 Being from South India- where there was no Islamic separatism- he seems more interested in Christian proselytization which the older generation were perfectly comfortable with. Indeed, plenty of Indian Christians turn into Hindu Swamys or Matajis. In any case, Christian missionaries and scholars did a lot to protect and promote mother tongues. Still, I must admit that in Punjab some Sikh activists are expressing strong views on missionary activity and Kejriwal & Co will need to defuse the situation very carefully. 

Deepak is very bright. He is trained in engineering and then took a specialized course in Intellectual Property law. A successful litigator, he is equally interested in constitutional law as well as his own ancestral tradition and national heritage. We wish him and his team well in his ongoing struggle to get justice for the Hindu temple foundations in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. 

Deepak says the is on a quest to understand Indic civilization on its own terms and to extend this understanding, in a concrete manner to Indian constitutional law.

The problem here is that, just as Aumann found game-theory in the Talmud, it is likely that ancient Dharma Sastras are only to be understood game theoretically in terms of 'Hohfeldian incidents' and the Coase-Posner 'Law & Econ' tradition. But, this is a tautology because 'mechanism design' is reverse game theory and Evolution under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty militates for robust mechanisms of a predictable sort. Thus, Deepak's engineering background would have more salience than some of the authors he quotes who are located in the West where they whine about Whitey. 

Decoloniality is a notion only relevant to 'settler colonies' where the indigenous people were decimated or enslaved. It has no applicability to India.

Still, Deepak is clearly very bright and conscientious and thus had plowed through turgid tomes on the advise of an older savant.

India needs nuclear power plants and container ports and other such 'development' which this type of anthropologist considers very wicked. Deepak himself might be viewed as some sort of Aryan invader up to no good. 

On the other hand, it is sensible for a litigator to assemble a panel of experts- more particularly tenured professors at prestigious Universities- so as to be able to demonstrate the legitimacy and coherence of his own view of the constitution.

There certainly are justiciable matters where Deepak's line of pleading could have purchase.  However, the concept of 'decoloniality' is problematic. It appears to rely on 'mayajaala'- some magic which the superior can use to control the minds of the inferior. Thus, if it obtains, it marks one group as inherently inferior to another group. 

I see a second book in this series is already available and a third is forthcoming. Sooner of later, the author will have tackle the vexed question of judicial reform and an expanded doctrine of political question so as to curb the growing nuisance posed by an activist but capricious Bench.