As a millennial Hindu, it’s been like navigating through nebula when it comes to fully grasping the loaded labels and buzzwords bandied around in the Indian sociopolitical sphere. The Hindu point of view is always incorrect in the dominant worldview. It is regarded as rude, backward, repressive, and hence harmful. Even within the Hindu population in India and abroad, the traditional Hindu way of life is sometimes looked down upon and dismissed. It is regarded as a diversion from a successful and happy life, whatever that may be – becoming a doctor, engineer, or whatever.

It appears that woke ideas disseminated by Western academia and media are gleefully welcomed by both the Left and, unfortunately, the Right. I’ve met far too many people my age and younger who believe these narratives to be true. A fundamental conviction running through my veins is that India’s civilizational path cannot and must not be defined by Western ontology, epistemology, and theology.

Last year, therefore, I began devouring Sita Ram Goel’s (SRG hereafter) books in order to obtain a better understanding of India’s historical and political landscape. I wanted to study and learn from someone who was there when things happened. Someone who had lived the life of a madman in the twentieth century, doing what no one else had the courage to do, and who had consistently burned the midnight oil to ensure that his own generation, as well as those to come in the future, could be awakened to the civilizational truths.

It’s safe to say that SRG’s Perversion of India’s Political Parlance provided me with the clear picture I was hoping for. The clear and concise collection begins with a personal anecdote from SRG himself, highlighting why there is something wrong in the first place when it comes to fair and equal treatment of a Hindu individual in India. The problem is then defined, with the root cause being the derailment of Hindu interests as a result of the weaponization of language. To be more explicit, what we now refer to as “Leftist Language” is the result of centuries of imperial authority, administration, and the language that accompanied those invading civilizations.

Each wave of imperialism (Islamic, Christian, Western/British, and Communist) brought with it its own “language,” and by the turn of the twentieth century, the innocent phrases and ideas in each imperialist’s subtle language had become weaponry. Certain words’ plain dictionary meanings grew to take on a much greater connotation, and these connotations served to hijack the entire discourse about independence, freedom, rights, and duties.

It’s frightening how powerful words can be. Here’s a simple table that outlines some of these words and shows the established binaries:

Leftist	Rightist
Progressive	Reactionary
Revolutionary	Revivalist
Socialist	Capitalist
Secular	Communal
Democratic	Fascist

These binaries have produced a battleground in which the Hindu is always wrong. These binaries represent a restricted spectrum into which the enormous Hindu worldview has been shoved and compressed. These binaries, to use the phrase of Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, “cut the head to suit the hat.”

SRG patiently explains each of these binary concepts based on the neutral dictionary meaning, as well as the contextual conditions in which these dictionary meanings can have positive or negative connotations. Furthermore, in each chapter, he continues to communicate the history and reality of the situation in India. Readers can see how language and parlance became a weapon, a tool to silence the Hindu voice and identity. The worst part is, these terms and labels are still thrown around today – I feel that not much has changed since SRG’s time with regards to the political parlance. I doubt SRG anticipated Twitter being a regular part of life, yet even in the new and current dimension of social media, the same labels are used as expletives.

After defining imperialist language with these binaries and evaluating their weaponization, SRG elaborates on the source, character, history, and role of the Leftist language. In fact, he devotes an essay to each of these topics in the book. I’d like to emphasise the character of Leftist language, and how SRG brings readers to a cathartic epiphany. He argues that despite the diversity of colonisers, invaders, and imperialists, there is a common linguistic thread running through all of India’s waves of imperialism. It was only after reading these characteristics that I was able to understand how parlance/language verily becomes a weapon. Couched and perverted language contributed to a civilization’s failure to perceive its actual opponents, realise its ideals, and emerge as a united, pluralist world power.

To rephrase the 8 characteristics that SRG highlights:

1. An inscrutable entity/person is invoked, who is beyond the reach of human reason and experience. This entity/person must be accepted on faith, and reason + experience are faulty faculties relative to faith. In fact, reason and experience can only be fulfilled if they follow and deepen faith in the inscrutable entity/person.
2. The imperial authority’s language divides human history into two distinct periods: the age of darkness that existed before the mission of the unique person/entity was announced, and the age of light that followed.
3. The imperial authority’s language divides the human family into two mutually exclusive camps: believers who accept imperial dogmas and unbelievers who follow different belief systems. It is important to keep in mind that believers are under a fundamental obligation to wage war on unbelievers until the latter are either converted or wiped off. Believers are not required to be superior human beings in terms of moral character or cerebral capacity. It is sufficient if they have the fervour and ferocity that comes from faith.
4. The language of imperialism binds all believers in a brotherhood that transcends all national boundaries of geography, history, and culture. Every nation is forced to surrender its autonomous identity and become a colony of the country where the unique imperial person was born, or where his dogmas first gained the support of brute armed power. This dead uniformity into which all nations are to be steam-rolled is hailed as universality.
5. The inscrutable entity/person has decreed that the entire globe be the brotherhood of believers. So, when the brotherhood or any section of it launches an offensive, it is by definition a liberation war; the brotherhood is simply claiming what is already its. Native people who have lived in their land for centuries lose all rights and become homeless in their own homeland, which was supposedly never their’s.
6. Every language of imperialism lays down the inevitable victory of the believers, and the inevitable defeat of the unbelievers. The believers are told that the inscrutable entity/person is on their side and that no power on earth can stop their onward march. The believers are thus enthused so that they spare no effort, and the unbelievers are demoralized so that they surrender or offer only half-hearted resistance.
7. Every single language of imperialism equips the believers with an immeasurable degree of self-righteousness. The believers carry the responsibility, burden, or mandate of bettering the unbelievers, whose lives, liberties, properties, and honour have already been forfeited to the believers by the inscrutable entity/person. The believers are not committing crimes when killing, enslaving, plundering, and humiliating the unbelievers; in fact, their crimes become meritorious deeds and build their own good conscience!
8. The unbelievers are accused of all sorts of crimes which they are supposed to have committed by the very fact of being what they are. In fact, the whole life history of every unbeliever becomes a catalogue of crimes, and the group is barred from sympathy from any quarters.

Using the characteristics listed above, SRG maps each wave of coloniality and how it “checked the box” with its own flavour of imperial language:

To say the least, it’s disconcerting.

SRG concludes his work by proposing a solution to the parlance problem and a course of action: He explains the importance of resurrecting Indic civilizational language. He does not mean regional languages or Sanskritam when he says this. Indic language, meaning: English that overcomes the previously imposed imperial, binary terms; English that reclaims the pluralist essence and foundation of Indic civilizational thought. Wherever possible, we will need to use our own non-translatable indigenous words. In other areas, we simply need to think and talk above the binaries and divisions constructed by successive waves of imperialists and colonisers. Of course, we should rediscover and strengthen our own experiences with our regional languages as well. Plus, if we haven’t already begun, we should study Sanskritam so that we can re-gain Indic knowledge from the original source.

Being more in touch with our Indic languages would also help us implement SRG’s solution: start using and elevating English to the frameworks and core understandings that our Indic languages establish. Begin thinking and speaking in English from our own ontology, epistemology, and theology. And stop thinking and speaking in English with these archaic binaries that carry garbage that we should have disposed of ages ago.

I’ll leave you with a screenshot from Google of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which I originally learned about in high school Psychology class:

 

 

SRG was an astute observer of the harmful repercussions of linguistic relativity in action; a perversion of political parlance results in a perversion of political thought. He understood that the waves of imperialism that India had suffered, as well as the transgenerational psychological trauma that still exists today, were made possible in large part by the phoney language employed to discuss the issues at hand. He advises readers to stop using these warped terms and to see imperial enemies for what they truly are. Only then could we be able to succeed as a community where we have previously failed.

Sita Ram Goel before lived through the twentieth century, a die-hard Hindu civilizational thinker ahead of his time, and he was able to gauge the perversion of India’s political parlance so precisely. If you haven’t read anything by him, you should start with this brief yet enlightening work. It provides a valuable framework for interpreting more current decolonialization literature. In the grand scheme of things, decolonialization has a long way to go, both in terms of thought and action at the civilizational level.