" ..“caste” and “tribe” as we understand them today, are ethnocentric categories created by the Christian European coloniser based on ethnographies o… - J Sai Deepak

That said, merely because Bharat is a living civilisation in the realm of society, it does not translate to Bharat being a civilisation-state. In other words, a State that presides over a civilisation is not a civilisation-state; instead, a State that is conscious of the civilisational character of its society and structures itself on civilisational lines is a civilisation-state. Therefore, one needs to go beyond the name Bharat to understand if the manner in which the Indian State has been structured and functions, is alive to the fact that the society it presides over is a federal civilisation, and not a nation in the European sense. Specifically, for the Indian State to be treated as an Indic civilisation-state, we would need to examine whether the State has been built on the fundamental building blocks of this civilisation, and whether its political and social infrastructure viewed through the prism of its Constitution is designed to replace the colonial consciousness with Indic consciousness.

With this, the discussion sought to be undertaken in this book comes to an end. This much is clear—by the end of 1924, Bharat’s indigeneity may have found a way, although not ideal, to live with a dual consciousness, namely the Bharatiya and the European. However, it was once again confronted with an earlier form of coloniality, namely Middle Eastern, which had managed to revive, reinvent and organise itself after the decline of the Mughal empire and was once again on the march. This time around, Bharat was ill-prepared to deal with this challenge owing to its dual consciousness, which severely limited its ability to call a spade a spade. Consequently, Bharat had embarked on the fatal path of accommodation and compromise under the burden of ‘values’ inherited from the Christian European coloniser, which muddled its sense of self, in the process leaving it woefully ill- equipped to weather the storm, which was no more brewing but had already announced its bloody arrival—or, more accurately, re-arrival—by the end of 1924.

To paraphrase writer and philosopher George Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed, and dare I say, cursed and condemned to repeat it.