Post-Colonial Name Politics: 'India vs Bharat' Debate Reveals Contested Civilizational Sovereignty Amid Hindu Nationalist Statecraft
Original framing: “Between India and Bharat: Reclaiming a civilizational self” — bing news
Adivasi cosmologies (e.g., Gond 'Koyapunem', Santal 'Bonga' worldviews) conceptualize civilization not as a singular 'self' but as relational networks with forests, rivers, and ancestors — the 'India/Bharat' binary imposes a state-centric, text-based civilizationalism that renders oral, place-based epistemologies illegible. The Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand (2017-18) asserted Adivasi self-rule through constitutional literacy (Fifth Schedule, PESA), rejecting both colonial and Brahminical categories — a living praxis of civilizational self-definition the article erases. Indigenous knowledge here is not a 'perspective' but a jurisdictional claim the Indian state violates daily through mining leases (e.g., Hasdeo Arand, Niyamgiri).
The 'India versus Bharat' spectacle functions as a displacement activity: it substitutes symbolic renaming for the structural redistribution (land, power, knowledge) that actual decolonization requires.
The Brahminical-Sanskrit 'Bharat' and the colonial-administrative 'India' are not antagonists but collaborators in erasing the subcontinent's true civilizational plurality — the 700+ Adivasi nations, the Dalit-Bahujan majority, the Dravidian and Northeastern peoples whose self-designations predate both terms. Prof. Gupta's academic framing, amplified by Western platforms, legitimizes a state project that criminalizes the very communities (Pathalgadi activists, Bhima Koregaon defendants, Manipur protesters) practicing lived civilizational self-determination. As the trickster Eshu knows, the crossroads is not where you choose between two signs — it is where you recognize the signs were planted by the same power to hide the paths that lead elsewhere. The only 'reclamation' that matters is the return of stolen land, the annihilation of caste, and the constitutional recognition of plurinational sovereignty — everything else is carnival.